Here's a fun fact to smugly regurgitate over brunch: Manchester hasn't held a Michelin star since 1974. 1974! That's 40 years of indistinct beige sludge sliding down the gullets of Mancunians with nary a truffle in sight. It's a mystery how they soldiered on through those dark years without shoving their heads in their Baby Bellings, but now the heavens have bestowed two shining stars to guide them to culinary salvation: chefs Aiden Byrne and Simon Rogan, as seen on Restaurant Wars: The Battle For Manchester (Mon, 8pm, BBC2). And are they grateful? Are they 'eck.

The French, an old-fashioned restaurant of musty opulence within the famous Midland Hotel, has been kept afloat in recent years by a few wealthy customers of a certain vintage. Simon is planning to relaunch it as a modern gastronomic experience, all grey Scandi-chic, the path to which is littered with cast-out bread trolleys and the skulls of stiff, tuxedoed waiters.

I couldn't say what Mancunians think of Simon, who has the charm of a belligerent tramp and the cold, glassy stare of a haunted goose freshly liberated from its foie gras Belsen, but as the hotel cleaning ladies behold their tiny dinners and the corners of their mouths slide down their faces, my guess is "not much". Unfortunately for them, Simon pipes his very being into his dishes. "What you see on the plate is a reflection of me," he bleats.

And if those primitive northerners aren't down with his miniature bowls of tosspot eucharist, well, they can spin. Simon tells Mrs Best, a bleach-blonde cliff-face of a woman who's dined thrice weekly at The French for 20 years, that his menu of raw ox in coal oil and gilded fish jelly will attract a different type of customer. Mrs Best's nostrils flare like a Komodo dragon sniffing out a rotting carcass as she defiantly pulls her Wallis-issue flak jacket blazer round her. I like Mrs Best a lot.

Meanwhile, Aiden Byrne, working with restaurateur Tim Bacon, is preparing to open the trendiest, priciest, most-Michelin-star-getting spot in town, Manchester House. Compared to the white heat of prickery Simon radiates, Aiden's like a saint. He could collect the ingredients for a blood and sputum jus by repeatedly punching his nan in the face and you'd gurn at the screen dribbling, "Aww, he's a good lad, inee?" The absurdity of this hypothetical nan-punching situation lessens when you learn of some of Aiden's dishes. How about a beetroot-fed oyster that looks suspiciously like something on the placards of frothing pro-lifers? Would sir care for a fizzing pill palate-cleanser – a cross-eyed, twitching wink towards Manchester's warehouse parties – or would sir regard the cold quease associated with chemically enhanced raves a tad unwise after such an unamusing bouche?

High-end restaurants have opened in Manchester before, and been ignored by the locals save for the odd pursed lip and raised eyebrow. Simon and Aiden, though, are slopping with confidence in their ability to drag those locals by the scruff of their necks to sophistication via haute grub.

And to be honest, they probably can. If you think culinary zeal has saturated popular culture to the point where a thick slice of bread is required to mop up the overspill, this is only the beginning. No one wants to be like our parents' generation, who subsisted throughout their lives on potato croquettes a dozen ways. We've largely failed to distance ourselves from that sorry lot by traditional means – sex, drugs, shit haircuts – so stupid and exciting food is another option. Maybe Aiden and Simon can indeed convince Mancunians that spending a week's wage on tiny globes of celeriac effluvium and fairy-dust scatterings in a notional emulsion is not only something to aspire to, but a completely reasonable state of affairs. Come to think of it, those uterine oysters didn't look too bad.